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"Get Minimal" got Maximum Fixes

Client

Some minimalistic websites are like icebergs; the top is neat and clean but the bottom is giant and hides many secrets. That's how we met https://www.getminimal.com/ whose leader was Elaine Siu, an entrepreneur from Hong Kong.

STARTING POINT

The WordPress-based website was riddled with WooCommerce plugins, some of them didn’t work and some conflicted with each other. One of the necessary plugins functioned incorrectly, and complicated Elaine's life as well as her vendors' businesses.

We weren’t the first programmers who had worked with the website. The torch was passed from the Chinese developers who had customized the shipping and delivery feature. The formula counted different vendors, countries, and shipping information. But soon it stopped working right, and the calculations had many errors.
Eventually, the owner ended up calculating the vendors’ rates manually. That’s not how she wanted to do her business. So she hired some Indian developers who tried to fix the code. Unfortunately, they didn’t send any reports and acted irresponsibly, so that the client had to guess if any work had been done or not? Those most unhappy circumstances led Elaine to us.

HOW THE PROJECT WAS GOING

It took us some time to figure out what was wrong with the code. It was literally checked line by line. The project manager learnt all the rates and shipping information by heart, she spent hours and hours calculating each test order. Our work was spread on both dev site and production.
Eventually, the delivery and shipping calculation was fixed as well. As they say “killed two birds with one stone” (or solved two problems with one action).
We proved ourselves to be a team of professionals and the client gave us a new job proposal.

Another Elaine’s headache was vendors’ monthly report - the one that had previously been coded by the Chinese team and wouldn’t report the correct calculations. It was generated automatically once a month and sent by default to the vendors from WordPress. Elaine simply wanted to turn it off, but simple things failed to work on her site.

We spent hours and hours trying to figure out the report origin, and finally were pretty sure we had disabled it. Elaine was against any tests with the report both on her dev and production sites not to bother the vendors, and … the report was sent by WordPress. Lucky us and Elaine - the report was empty. Having seen it in body so to say, we’ve managed to disable it for good. Seems like a fairy-tale :) But for us and the client those days were a real nightmare!

The time we spent on fixing the old plugin was enough to develop a new one. But the WP admin was full of plugins and another one might conflict with the rest of the bunch. We can tell from our experience that it’s a common situation among WooCommerce customers. The plugin market is huge. And if you are an amateur owner of an online shop you might get and install too many plugins, wrong plugins or useless plugins. We recommend to ask advice of a specialist first. It will save your time, money and nerves. Our client wasn’t an amateur but still she buried her website in plugins. And that led to the incorrect work of the whole WooCommerce + WordPress system.

That was our biggest fix and the most expensive of all. But still, the client would have spent more time and money if she had continued working with her old developers.

Our team proved the client our strong points which are: reliability, quality, competence, openness, flexibility, maximum focus on the customer. We are proud of our skilled developers who can read the code and find weaknesses in it; our project managers who understand developers’ work as well as customers’ needs. We care about our clients that’s why the managers communicate with them on a daily basis; send them detailed reports regularly.

ACHIEVED RESULT

In the end, we saved the client’s e-commerce business and the website that was overflowed with plugins. Her online store still continues to make her profit.